Making music in Linux and beyond

“You can do a lot with free open-source software, also known as
FOSS. Musicians with a yen for Linux are in luck; the array of
choices for creating, editing, producing, and publishing music
using nothing but FOSS software is staggering.

“One way to get your hands on a plethora of audio tools is to
run the Ubuntu Studio distro, which comes preconfigured for
real-time audio processing and includes every studio tool under the
sun. Failing that, there are the ubuntustudio-audio and
ubuntustudio-audio-plugins virtual packages in Ubuntu, which will
install 54 and 18 specialized packages, respectively. Other
alternatives include the Musix distribution and the low-end
hardware distro dyne:bolic, but Ubuntu Studio has the largest
toolkit in the genre and enjoys the widest support as well.

“Pick your favorite multimedia distro and go nuts, or just
install the applications you want to try out, one RPM or DEB
package at a time.

“To cover it all in useful detail would take a book, so we’ll
spare you most of the gory details. Instead, this article will
focus on a few of the leading suites used to actually make
music—multi-track MIDI sequencers with the ability to add
live audio tracks such as guitar strums and voice.”

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